Liberty Project Leaders Deny Charges Behind Probe

NEW YORK — The plea is compelling: a tarnished, weatherbeaten Statue of Liberty appealing to Americans in a weary voice, ''If you still believe in me, save me.''

Millions of Americans, from schoolchildren to corporations, have responded to the broadcast ads with $170 million in contributions in the two years that the fund-raising campaign has been under way.

But serious questions have come up about the accountability of the private, non-profit foundation to which the U.S. government gave much of the responsibility for restoring the Statue of Liberty. The questions are serious enough for a congressional subcommittee to have asked for a federal audit of how the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation has used the money it has raised.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, began an audit July 8 to see whether there is any basis to claims by a former National Park Service official, Garnet Chapin, that the foundation withheld financial reports and other information from government officials and that the project is in a state of ''chaos.'' The GAO audit is expected to be completed by September or October.

Foundation officials say that the charges are unfounded and that the restoration work is proceeding on schedule.

''We are squeaky clean,'' said Keith Eastin, a member of the foundation's board who is also an associate solicitor for the Interior Department.

Under an agreement signed two years ago, the foundation, which is headed by Chrysler Corp. chairman Lee Iacocca, was given responsibility not only for the fund raising but also for the planning, contracting and day-to-day supervision of most of the restoration work. The National Park Service, which operates and maintains national monuments, was to oversee the foundation's work.

With its original fund-raising goal of $230 million, the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island restoration qualified as the largest example of such a partnership within the park service. Iacocca has since said that $30 million to $35 million more will be needed, primarily for work on Liberty Island, on which the statue stands.

The investigation grew out of charges that Chapin, who had been a special assistant to the director of the National Park Service, made at a June 27 hearing of the House subcommittee on national parks and recreation. Chapin, an architect who had been the park service's liaison with the foundation for several years, was fired from his job in January.

Charles Clapper, associate regional director of the park service, said that Chapin was a political appointee and his contract had expired. ''As time went by it became more and more evident that you really needed someone who was a non-political appointee to handle this project,'' Clapper said.

Chapin did not respond to numerous efforts to reach him by phone.

Chapin told the subcommittee he had been extremely frustrated in his years on the project because he could not get even the most rudimentary reports from foundation officials. He said that for the first two years of the project, none of the contracts that the foundation negotiated were submitted for review -- a charge denied by foundation and park service officials.

In his testimony, Chapin said that with the exception of the Statue of Liberty itself and its base, ''my sense of the project is that it's in a total state of chaos from the point of view of the professionals actually involved.''

Besides the statue, the project includes restoration of the grounds of Liberty Island, where the statue stands, and several buildings on nearby Ellis Island, the immigration station where 17 million people entered the United States from 1892 to 1954.

Foundation officials, while conceding that the work has not been without some problems, say they have done nothing wrong and that the statue project would never be completed by its July 4, 1986, deadline if it was left solely to the government.

Foundation officials say their records have always been open for inspection.

Henning Nielsen, a spokesman for the foundation, which has 146 employes in its headquarters in New York and regional offices around the country, said that park service officials have supervised every major decision made by the foundation.

Eastin, the associate solicitor for the Interior Department and a member of the foundation's board, said the park service gets monthly and sometimes weekly reports on the project.

The General Accounting Office also will look into other charges made at the hearing. Among them:

-- That a $500,000 payment was made to a group of French engineers, though an outside audit indicated that a payment of that size was not warranted. Eastin says the payment was justified.

-- That a centennial commission set up in 1982, which includes celebrities and corporate executives who were to help plan events for the statue's centennial, has not met since February 1984, though money has been available. Park service officials respond to that by saying that the commission hasn't met because it has not had anything to discuss.

-- That the project was not well planned. When work on the Statue of Liberty was begun, for example, it was announced that the monument would remain open to the public while repairs were made. However, last month Liberty Island was closed and is expected to remain closed until the centennial celebration in July 1986.

Also there is still no approved plan for the whole of Ellis Island. Construction on the main building, which is being restored, is expected to be completed in 1987. But the fate of the rest of the island is undecided.